Community Legal Education

Once enrolled, course enrollees receive real-time virtual support from i4J; close-captioned recordings of all course content; and layered methods of experiential learning. During the training term, i4J’s Instructional Support Team provides course enrollees with regular content review sessions, graded legal practice questions, and collaborative opportunities for community-based education. In bringing together regular cohorts of enrollees across our CLE Initiatives, i4J seeks to foster cross-jurisdictional learning through a community law school classroom. After training, i4J supports the examination and certification (in Arizona) of participating advocates. Upon their successful completion of training and fulfillment of all steps toward state-level authorization, participating advocates in both states are recognized as community-based justice workers.

After training, i4J connects justice workers with a network of licensed volunteer attorneys to mentor, provide support, and champion advocates’ work in service of communities. i4J supplements mentorship with continuing education opportunities in the form of monthly newsletters on changes in the legal area(s) where justice workers practice, professional development experiences, and relevant webinars that can help supplement their limited-scope advocacy. Ongoing training and the mentorship of justice workers, as facilitated by i4J, serve as added tools that advocates can use within the course of their current work at a community-based organization.

Our CLE Initiatives and accompanying training curricula are the result of robust community engagement and intentional co-development with subject matter experts in the states where we train. i4J’s Community Legal Education has undergone rigorous feedback processes and is the outcome of years of lived and practiced experience in navigating legal systems from within and beyond each state’s respective legal communities. We maintain a feedback loop with justice workers to understand what services they are providing, whether the contents of their training adequately prepared them for unsupervised legal advocacy, as well as when and how the curriculum might be improved. i4J simultaneously collaborates with researchers across the country to adopt innovative metrics by which justice workers’ services can be evaluated. These metrics focus on ensuring that consumers are not harmed, that justice workers’ services are effective, and that our programs serve the legal empowerment aims they set out to achieve. To further support the work of participating advocates, i4J assists organizations in connecting with an insurance carrier. While justice workers, like attorneys, are not required to hold malpractice insurance, i4J recognizes that a justice worker’s host organization may wish to voluntarily take on or expand an insurance policy to cover their advocate’s limited-scope legal services.

Standard 306 of the ABA Standards and Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools prohibits U.S. law schools from granting more than 50% of credits toward the Juris Doctor degree via “Distance Education Courses.” For prospective law students who are disabled, parents, working-class, nontraditional, first-generation, and of historically minoritized identities, this commitment to in-person learning can render law school more of a dream than reality. i4J’s justice worker trainings are not subject to this restriction, allowing us to rethink in what novel, accessible ways our training of legal advocates everywhere might be grounded in community needs. This necessarily includes the contents of traditional legal education. Our approach to Community Legal Education is grounded in values of legal empowerment; trauma-informed advocacy; racial, procedural, distributive, and disability justice; experiential and lifelong learning; and community-responsive curricula.